Texturing.

What is the best way to texture items and what the best programs to create height,diffuse,normal, and other types of maps for textures?

 

I personally prefer 3D coat . All there and very great and easy to use for texturing, uv mapping, retopo, sculpting , map backing , texture transfer and much more
Is a swiss knife and my main tool for my asset development. I have really fun with this tool.

 

Another candidate: Substance Painter
I recommend the Live package, so you get a set of tools that work well with Unity.

 

My vote is with Substance Painter/Designer as well.

If your game style isn't going to be using the PBR shader you can still use Painter/Designer. Though you could also be served well just learning how to paint them in GIMP/Photoshop, or learning the whole "hand-painted style" simply using Blender's texture paint tools.

There are tons of ways to go about it. The best tool for you will depend on what you have(or have access to or are willing to gain access to/purchase), what you know how to use, what you are willing to learn how to use, what style of game art you are doing, and even beyond that, which tool is simply easier for you to use. Some people, like me, even with an understanding of how 2d/3d/uv mapping works, still can't paint textures directly in 2d much, so in my case, painting directly in 3d is quite important.

 

You could use Crazy Bump, or Xnormal, for making those type of maps too.

 

Like what BrandyStarbrite said: CrazyBump is a good program.
CrazyBump also gives you a 30-day unrestricted trial, so you can try it out.
I don't think Xnormal gives you a trial version though, you can't save the normals unless you purchase the product.
GIMP is also good, it's free, but i find the built-in normal/bump map software is not as good as programs like CrazyBump.

 

@TTTTTa :
xNormal is free.
Generating normalmaps from images (using GIMP, Substance B2M, etc) is something you shouldn't do unless you absolutely have to. You should always generate them by baking the normal information from a high- to a low-poly model. Only then you'll have accurate results.

@KingLlama :
Another vote for Substance Live.
It comes with three tools (Designer, Painter, B2M) and there's a monthly substance drop where you can download 5 AAA-grade substances for free.
Furthermore it's not a subscription. Once you paid everything off (which you can do at any given point), it's yours to keep.

 

You are right about xNormal. I confused ShaderMap with xNormal.
I was suggesting using Crazybump for things like floors tiles and walls and flat surfaces. You guys are taking about more complex models like trees and such?

 

@TTTTTa :
As I already said, Substance Live comes with three applications:

Substance Designer:​

This can be used for both, tiled materials and models with more complicated UV maps. At the moment I use it for "floors, tiles and walls and flat surfaces" exclusively.
This has to do with how substances are exported to Unity. Say you have a simple, tilable PBR concrete material for floors. You'll have the following files:

• Alebdo
• Normal map
• Metallic
  
• Ambient Occlusion
• .mat file
• a .meta file for each of them

This results in 10 files per material. When you export a Substance, you get a single .sbsar file. It's an archive that contains everything. With the .meta file you get 2 files per material.
This means that you can simply create a directory called "concrete" and drop all your concrete texture variations in there without it becoming a complete clusterfuck.
Furthermore you can easily change the resolution without reexporting. Simply select the desired resolution from the dropdown list within Unity and the material within the substance archive will use scaled versions of the textures.
This allows you to work with high resolution textures (say 4096x4096) even if you don't want to use such a high resolution in this particular case. You export it once and then set the resolution within Unity.
In short:
I use Substance Designer for simple materials because it's way more comfortable than working directly with Unity materials.

Substance Painter:​

This one isn't for tiled materials, but for complex models. It's amazing, though it eats RAM like crazy. I currently have 8GB and it's just not enough for high resolution work.

B2M:​

The idea of Bitmap2Material is to take a photo of a texture and turn it into a PBR-ready material. You basically take a picture and generate all the required maps (albedo, metallic, roughness, etc.) from it.
Just as with GIMP/Photoshop you still have the problem that certain maps (normal map and ambient occlusion) tend to look absolutely awful in certain scenarios. You're better off baking them properly using a high-poly mesh in Substance Designer or xNormal.
I use mainly use B2M to turn old non-PBR materials into PBR ones. I'm very pleased with the results.

 

Sounds like theese are worth looking into then. Right now I only do normal maps, I could use these for metallic and ambient occlusion maps, which is probally what I need to make things look better

 

Get Substance Live.
B2M itself is...meh...to put it nicely.

 

Those sound amazing actually!! I think substance designer it is. Once next check comes I'll be investing into it!! Thank you guys for the amazing feedback. What exactly is pbr?

 

PBR is physically based rendering. Unity 5's Standard Shader works with it, as do some other modern game engines. "Traditional" shaders use diffuse for color, then can have normals, spec map, and others. PBR has 2 common pipelines(Metallic, and Specular) which can give the same results. Albedo is common in both, as is the normal map. There is a roughness(or glossiness) in both. Then the differences enter. The metallic workflow adds in another texture that determines how "metallic" something is. This is used to determine lighting. It also makes the albedo color into a specular color, and the albedo itself then black. With the specular workflow, you no longer directly have a texture saying what is metallic, rather you use a "specular" texture, which is different from the specular in traditional shaders. Metals are generally in reality a black diffuse color, but have a bright reflective color, giving them what appears to be a false diffuse color. A metal in the dark, even with a light on it, will be black except for what it can reflect. So for metals, the albedo needs to be dark, and the specular bright. For non-metals, it is the other way around.

I recommend you check out google on this. There are some good resources provided by Marmoset that explains this better than I have here.

Also, I once again put up my vote for Substance Live. You get 2 great products in Designer and Painter, and B2M is useful for some people too. And this is all for $20 a month as a rent to own, not a subscription. You can't beat that except as free, and the software is great.

 

Can someone explain exactly what Ambient Occlusion is? Or post a screenshot?
What does it do?
Because I have been adding Occlusion maps to the standard shader in Unity, and it doesnt seem to have any effect at all. I thought it had something to do with simulating small crevices. But I feel now you are saying it is something else.
Thanks

 

@TTTTTa :
Why don't you show us how your ambient occlusion maps look like?
What AO does should be pretty obvious when you do a simple Google Image search.

 

AO is basically a mask map that alphas out the items that are in light(ambient light specifically). It has higher values the darker something is. How the shader uses it depends on the shader. It might be used for example as a basic overlay making things darker in crevices regardless of lighting. Unity 5's shader uses it to actually vary both reflectivity and fresnel values. Sometimes it is simply used to help with painting textures in order to know where internal shadows are.

 

Ok thanks for the info. After going to the NVIDIA support site, it has info that the AO may not be detected under certain lighting conditions in the game,, it may also have something to do with my HW settings which explains why I dont notice anything different with the AO. ll have to look into this more
Thanks.

 

I figured out what the problem was: The AO in the lighting window was turned off, so the AO maps were doing nothing.
Now I can clearly see the difference when I enabled AO.


j

 

I literally just spent three hours learning how to use b2m and substance painter....oh my god I am in love......I don't feel soooooo overwhelmed compared to trying to create normal maps and other substances to make my game look pretty. You guys are sooo amazing. I'll be doing the subscription for this!

 

Just to add something:
In Blender, you can actually bake normal maps from high-poly to low-poly objects, which can be handy sometimes if you are working on architecture and / or if you don't have something like 3D-Coat.

 

I didn't like baking normal maps in Blender. The results aren't correct either, aren't they? In Substance/xNormal you need to set the tangent space to Unity otherwise the normal maps end up different after importing them into Unity.
Substance has the Unity tangent space plugin built in. For xNormal you need to download it here.

 

The normal maps I tried to bake in Blender worked perfectly. However, you can do many things incorrectly, so it is a little bit tricky to set up.

 

Like you SniperFan I like SD just because it provides all the materials and textures and all their possible variations in a single bundle clutter-free, especially that things tend to get messy with materials and textures, not to mention size gains.
But the biggest drawback is that I can't use it for UVed models, it's just for simple planes I hope someone proves me wrong.
Wonder if Painter can or will export sbsar in the future that work with UVs, for now I know it just exports tons of textures old school which is bad.

 

Well, SD textures can be used for something with UVs. There is a bit more work involved to make it work easily though. You generally have to make separate materials on the model, and then assign them the SD packages separately. Also, the UVs have to be pretty "flat" as in even if the model is curved, the UVs have to remove the distortion. Proper UVs will be made like that anyway, especially considering the fact that the way we used to texture things was on the flat UVs, and having to compensate directly for said distortion. Nowadays, if you know you are painting directly on the model, you can make the UVs less perfect because you aren't painting on distortion, as long as they are what you would call "adequate." But this "adequate" won't be good enough for SD textures.

 

Actually I was thinking about Painter as the closest solution, if only Allegorithmic could figure a way to make polymorph procedural materials that can have irreular borders. or at least make Painter export a substance archive with the textures baked in there just for the convenience of the workflow...

 

What?
Of course SD works with those models. In fact, I currently use SD to do exactly that. There isn't even a workflow difference there (take maps - in my case from Painter -, put them into a substance, export). If SD wouldn't support UV unwrapped models, having all those baking options wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, would it?

I guess the reason for why there's no option to directly export to an .sbsar from within Painter is that they would have to pretty much include SD in Painter itself.

 

I mean the procedural nodes don't work with complicated uv-unwrapped monolithic piece of geometry, and there won't be any gains in size if you use external bitmaps. Only advantage would be the sbsar workflow.

 

You are right about that xCyborg. Remember though...there are limits to procedural textures. If you start from nothing, designing it yourself in Designer, then the limit is in the fact that the UVs need to somewhat conform to the flat surface with little to no distortion, which is better anyway, and is a requirement of the past when people had no choice but to paint on the flat surface. On the other hand, there isn't any easy way(or hard way for that matter) that I know of to try to get some sort of procedural nodes out of some random texture. Painter exports said random textures, as you paint your model however you want, maybe using procedurals as tools, but not as results directly. By that point, you may as well just use the textures directly in Unity instead of putting them into sbsar files.

If you make your models with proper UVs like I describe above, you can use designer to create the materials. But you still need to create separate materials as parts of your models. Then you also need to know your way around the creation of the procedural materials, or you need to have some handy that fit your project that you obtained/bought/whatever. I prefer using designer here and there to create textures. Then I use painter to paint my models, then I directly use the textures. I'm not working on mobile(and if I were, I'd use GMStudio for many reasons, and make 2d games instead as well), so for PCs, performance and space for textures is much less of a concern.

 

Exactly, I develop for mobile and I can't afford a dozen materials per object, and the smaller size footprint was the main attraction in Substances for me.

 

Gave the trial a go this morning and got myself really interested in the tool so thanks alot for sharing, had never heard of it before. Quite user friendly aswell, in my opinion.